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This collection of thirteen essays brings together Italian and American scholars to present a cooperative analysis of the Italian short story, beginning in the fourteenth century with Giovanni Boccaccio and arriving at the twentieth century with Alberto Moravia and Anna Maria Ortese. Throughout the book, the contributors carefully and intentionally unpack and explain the development of the short story genre and demonstrate the breadth of themes – cultural, historical and linguistic – detailed in these narratives. Dedicated to a genre “devoted to lightness and flexibility, as well as quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity,” this collection paints a careful and exacting picture of an important part of both Italian and literary history.
Travelling Chronicles presents fourteen episodes in the history of news, written by some of the leading scholars in the rapidly developing fields of news and newspaper studies. Ranging across eastern and western Europe and beyond, the chapters look back to the early modern period and into the eighteenth century to consider how the news of the past was gathered and spread, how news outlets gained respect and influence, how news functioned as a business, and also how the historiography of news can be conducted with the resources available to scholars today. Travelling Chronicles offers a timely analysis of early news, at a moment when historical newspaper archives are being widely digitalised and as the truth value of news in our own time undergoes intense scrutiny.
"In this elegantly constructed study of the early decades of public opera, the conflicts and cooperation of poets, composers, managers, designers, and singers—producing the art form that was soon to sweep the world and that has been dominant ever since—are revealed in their first freshness."—Andrew Porter "This will be a standard work on the subject of the rise of Venetian opera for decades. Rosand has provided a decisive contribution to the reshaping of the entire subject. . . . She offers a profoundly new view of baroque opera based on a solid documentary and historical-critical foundation. The treatment of the artistic self-consciousness and professional activities of the librettists, impresarios, singers, and composers is exemplary, as is the examination of their reciprocal relations. This work will have a positive effect not only on studies of 17th-century, but on the history of opera in general."—Lorenzo Bianconi
In the great days of Italian fortification literature – the century from Valle's first Venetian edition in 1524 to the appearance of Tensini in 1624 – Venice accounted for roughly as many titles as the rest of Europe together. Books on fortification were a natural for the enterprising printer-publishers of this city-state, free from the constraints of small-minded princes and their paranoid insistence on "state secrets". This annotated catalogue describes 350 books, published until the time when Venice ceased to be an independent state. It provides massive documentation taking into account the many "ghosts" created by misprints or over-zealous bibliographers and gives full collations, extensive annotations and locations of copies of all entries. An index of printers and a "bibliographie raisonnée" of the sources used, appear at the end. The thirty-five illustrations are chosen for their relevance to the subject and range from early bastion traces to emblematic portraits.
The essays in this collection explore a number of significant questions regarding the terms 'radical' and 'radicalism' in early modern English contexts. They investigate whether we can speak of a radical tradition, and whether radicalism was a local, national or transnational phenomenon. In so doing this volume examines the exchange of ideas and texts in the history of supposedly radical events, ideologies and movements (or moments). Once at the cutting edge of academic debate radicalism had, until very recently, fallen prey to historiographical trends as scholars increasingly turned their attention to more mainstream experiences or reactionary forces. While acknowledging the importance of t...
An exploration of the castrato as a critical provocation to explore the relationships between sound, music, voice instrument, and machine. Italian courts and churches began employing castrato singers in the late sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century, the singers occupied a celebrity status on the operatic stage. Constructed through surgical alteration and further modified by rigorous training, castrati inhabited human bodies that had been “mechanized” to produce sounds in ways that unmechanized bodies could not. The voices of these technologically enhanced singers, with their unique timbre, range, and strength, contributed to a dramatic expansion of musical vocabulary and prompted...
The Arab spring, protest movements in the EU, Russia, Turkey or elsewhere, are often labeled as twitter-revolutions. A crucial role is attributed to the new media, coverage of events abroad and ensuing mutual reactions. With the dissemination of print, revolts in early-modern times faced the challenge of a similar media-revolution. This influenced the very face of the events that could become full-fledged propaganda wars once the insurgents had won access to the printing press. But it also had an impact on revolt-narratives. Governments severely persecuted dissident views in such delicate issues as revolts. Observers abroad had no such divided loyalties and were freer to reflect upon the events. Therefore, the book focuses mainly on representations of revolts across borders.
Inventing the Business of Opera explores public opera in its infancy, bringing to life the men and women who successfully established the new genre on the stages of Venice during the seventeenth century. All of the components necessary to opera production are highlighted, from the financial backing, to the libretto and the score, to the singers, dancers, the scenery, and the costumes.